Sprint pledge MeeGo support

A common criticism for Nokia in the US is that the company fails to collaborate sufficiently with the carriers, thus seeing its handsets marginalized in favor of rival phones. It seems Intel and Nokia aren't willing to let that be the fate of MeeGo, however; they've thrown in with Sprint at the carrier's annual developer conference, where the operator confirmed it would be looking to leverage the open-source OS "across an array of devices."

Curiously, Intel's news brief about the partnership is no longer available, though you can find Google's cache of it here (the full text is below); there's also no mention on Sprint's site. Intel is only talking about Atom-based devices - such as in-vehicle infotainment - since that's unsurprisingly their chipset of choice, but we're hoping Nokia make the most of this foot-in-the-door when their first MeeGo devices come through in 2011.

Press Release:

Sprint Joins Ecosystem of MeeGo Supporters

At the Sprint Developer Conference today, Sprint discussed how a cross-platform approach with open source operating systems like MeeGo are key to enabling the development of innovative services and applications across an array of devices, including in-vehicle infotainment, reducing complexity. Leveraging MeeGo, the Sprint developer community can offer a range of solutions based on Intel Atom architecture. Coming on the heels of yesterday’s M2M Collaboration Center news, Intel and Sprint believe this collaboration can help accelerate the evaluation of platforms like MeeGo to deliver solutions to market faster and running on Sprint’s 3G-4G wireless broadband network.